Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Family Guy movie

This might be old news to some of you, but it was new to me.

The Family Guy movie about Stewie's true father is going to be released straight to DVD on September 27th.

It's always interesting to see if a normally 1/2 hour cartoon can sustain a premise for an entire 1.5 hours. What has happened with these sorts of attempts in the past? They pretty much just up the animation quality and write an "important" story, about cancer or losing your job or something, and introduce a lame new character. Why do that rather than three complete new episodes? Still, I'm curious to see it. It'll probably be a lot better than the Simpsons movie, anyway.

8 comments:

They were talking about it on the radio the other day and it sounds really funny. Apparently some of the material is from episodes that were written before the show got canceled and the thought it was so good they didn't want to put it to waste. This was long before the deal was in place to ressurect the series.

My comments were directed at comedies. Of course dramatic/action TV begs for higher production values and a deeper story. Comedies, in the vein of Simpsons or Family Guy, do not. The best comedic moments Family Guy especially are entirely self-contained, and thus do not need an hour and a half to develop them.

And I still haven't seen The Mask of the Phantasm, though it is in my queue and should come next week sometime.

Well, Vol. 3 has all of the Ventriloquist's episodes and all of Ra's al Ghul's episodes (except for the introduction of Talia, on Vol. 2). It also has a couple of my all-time favorites eps, Blind as a Bat and Time Out of Joint. Some other good eps on V3 are Fire from Olympus and the Lion & and the Unicorn, which reveals some of Alfred's history in the SAS or something.

But I haven't seen any of them since they were on TV so they're basically just the eps I know I want to see again. I can also vouch for Vol. 1, which has some classics like On Leather Wings (the very first one and really dark!) and Heart of Ice (the first Mr. Freeze ep), as well as the 2-part origin of Two-Face (not to mention 2-part intros for Catwoman and Clayface), and some great single eps like the Gray Ghost and the Rashomon-style "POV."

Just make sure that before you decide on any one of the three vols that you compare the episode list for each on DVDAF.com with the complete episode guide at BatmanTAS.com, which is especially handy because you can click on a villain and see every ep he or she appears in. I'm sure I'll get Vol. 2 eventually, I just don't need the origin of Robin yet. ;-)